Faith & RitualGreek → English
Cathedral
/kəˈθiːdrəl/noun
The principal church of a diocese, containing the bishop's throne.
The Greek roots
κατά
katá
down
ἕδρα
hédra
seat
Literally: “down-seat, chair”
The story of the word
καθέδρα is furniture. It is the thing you sit down on, and in the Latin church it meant the bishop's chair, so a cathedral is not a large church but the church holding that chair. A modest building can be a cathedral and an enormous one cannot. English said 'cathedral church' for three centuries before dropping the noun in the 1580s and letting the adjective stand alone.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 1580s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chaircathedrasanhedrinpolyhedron
In a sentence
The cathedral took two hundred years to finish and three architects died mid-project.
We sheltered from the rain in the cathedral porch.